A
Report to the Conservation Technology Support Program from The Woods Hole
Research Center for the period Aug. 1, 1995 - July 31, 1996.

Mission Statement of the Woods Hole Research Center: The
Woods Hole Research Center was founded in 1985 to address global environmental
problems. The thirty-member staff is engaged in scientific research, global
environmental policy, and education. Research focuses on the structure
and function of natural ecosystems with a special emphasis on forests and
their role in global ecology. Projects include effects of fire on the Amazonian
rain forest and the boreal forests of Siberia, measurement of the carbon
stored in, and released from, global forests including those of New England,
and helping forest dwellers in Brazil preserve their habitat as a sustainable
resource.

Using satellite imagery, the Center's remote sensing unit creates computer
generated maps to monitor the earth's vegetation. The science in public
affairs program was instrumental in the creation of the World Commission
on Forests and Sustainable Development and is an active participant in
advancing the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention
on Biological Diversity both of which emerged from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

(Research
Associate Peter Schlesinger (l.) and Senior Research Associate Tom Stone
examine a plot of their1-km vegetation- classification of South America
produced on a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 650C plotter).

1. Summary of GIS Progress and Achievements: The CSTP
award has enabled the Remote Sensing and GIS lab of the Woods Hole Research
Center to make considerable progress in research, training, public relations
and publishing. The most notable advances have been made in the area of
research, where the Hewlett Packard workstation and its UNIX operating
system have allowed us to work with large data sets that had been previously
unavailable to us or simply beyond the capacity of our equipment. The acquisition
of a large-format plotter has opened up new possibilities for our group
in the areas of public relations, education, and ground- truthing.

The workstation is being used regularly for downloading data via the
Internet from sites around the world, including the Russian Academy of
Sciences and the Brazilian National Space Agency (INPE). Similarly, the
Hewlett Packard workstation allows us to collaborate more effectively with
colleagues at federal agencies in the United States such as NASA and the
US Forest Service, as well as with various NGOs and a large number of universities.
The HP platform has enabled us to participate in the NASA BOREAS Long term
Ecological Research (LTER) project in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as the
data sets from this multi-institutional and multi-national research have
been distributed only in UNIX formats. We are also making significant use
of global 1-km resolution satellite data obtained via the Internet from
the USGS.

Significant GIS Achievements: One of the two most significant
projects accomplished with the new equipment would have to be some work
we have undertaken with funding from NASA which uses the GRID module of
ArcInfo to analyze vegetation cover in the former Soviet Union. While
we had already been using the PC version of ArcInfo regularly in the laboratory,
the donation of the UNIX version of the software gave us the ability to
acquire new databases that were previously unavailable to us, including
a truly massive vegetation cover map of Russia that had been digitized
in Moscow and provided to the World Conservation Monitoring Center in England.
This dataset is crucial to work we are engaged in to produce a 1K resolution
vegetation cover map of this region. Before we had ArcInfo GRID, we were
unable to use this dataset because of its enormous size and complexity,
but we are now able to engage in research using such datasets without hesitation.

(Rio Bajo Urubamba, Peru - a classified image of 2 Landsat
TM scenes from two dates in 1988 and 1989, (Path/Rows 004/68 and 005/68).
This tropical forest region belongs to the Machinguenga indigenous peoples
who have been working for several years to establish legal title to their
lands. A distinct type of mixed bamboo forest known as "pacales"
is dominant in this region. The Machiguenga people of this nearly undisturbed
region are now facing the prospect of large scale natural gas extraction
and the ecological and social disruption that attends this type of industrialization).(Full size Urubamba
map: 199kb)

Our second accomplishment of significance is the production of large
format plots using the HP DesignJet 650C Plotter to aid in our field work
in South America. We are working in conjunction with Oxfam America to create
a geographical database of forest cover and a description of land and vegetation
cover for the purpose of developing a baseline estimate of forest biomass.

(Villagers
of the Brazilian Amazon region use WHRC satellite images to assess local
land-use changes).

(Researcher
Marli Mattos explains the use of satellite imagery to villagers of the
Rio Capim region in northern Brazil---------->).

The Oxfam project partners have been working for several years on establishing
legal tenure for indigenous territories located in tropical forest regions
within Bolivia and Peru, and the HP equipment has been vital for producing
maps to aid in this work. Map resources of this type are very highly valued
by forest managers and researchers in tropical forest regions, where useful
base maps are often badly outdated or nonexistent. In our various research
sites in Brazil, our scientists find that these compelling large-format
plots are a tremendous aid in their work. Large scale color plots of TM
imagery of the state of Acre have been produced here in Woods Hole with
the support of various private foundations and the Universidade Federal
do Acre, Brazil, using the CTSP equipment. Several images or plots were
taken to Acre in June 1996 by Dr. Foster Brown, a geochemist. There they
are being used in classroom exercises with university students and members
of the military, and in the field with rubber tapper families for the delineation
of traditional plot boundaries and forest trails. They are extensively
used for field-checking of vegetation cover, as well.

2. GIS Goals: As our GIS lab is well-established, our
goals do not change rapidly. We will continue to produce land cover maps
of different parts of the world for evaluating land conversion and land
use change. We have a particular focus on modeling the implications of
land use change on the regional and global carbon cycle, and our GIS work
will feed into our policy program which seeks to connect our research to
international policy at the highest levels of government. Lastly, we will
continue to teach principles and applications of GIS to Russian and South
American scholars in the field and here in our lab.

3. Needs for our GIS program for the coming year: We feel
that we have only begun to utilize the capabilities of the new workstation,
plotter, and software. Our primary needs now are to train more staffers
here in the uses and capabilities of the software and equipment, and to
acquire a few more items of software and equipment to optimize the equipment
we have. These items are: a. NFS software on the UNIX platform to link
to PCs and Novell and NT servers. b. CD-Recordable to transfer and archive
aging 9-track tapes. c. Software to link HP workstation to Plotter via
JetDirect LAN card. d. More manuals and technical support.

In addition, we will continue to have a series of visiting scholars
in residence for a few months at a time from Amazonia and from Russia as
we have in the past. We are much interested in helping them learn the capabilities
of this new equipment and software.